The project theme is very personal to me, as it represents my own feeling about suffering from depression. I have explored a range of ways of visually representing the feelings behind this mental illness. In particular, I wanted to try and represent the positive aspects of the condition as I feel that this is something that is overlooked - there are elements of depression that can aid creativity and wellbeing in some respects.
I feel very strongly about how mental health is overlooked and shadowed. 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression. That's 6.9 percent of the population. It is a leading cause of disability and goes unseen from person to person. The problem is doctors don't provide enough knowledge to the general public and therefore people see it as 'thats serious don't be stupid.' This stops people who truly suffer from speaking out, weather they always feel sad or have suicidal thoughts. Due to the lack of knowledge people either skip the subject because its 'too serious' or they joke about wanting to 'kill themselves,' either should not be something that is accepted in society. Depression needs to be talked about as a serious matter that shouldn't be overlooked or foreseen.
There are 8 different types of depression;
If you're reading this as somebody who doesn't suffer from depression, here is some information to help you understand;
I feel very strongly about how mental health is overlooked and shadowed. 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression. That's 6.9 percent of the population. It is a leading cause of disability and goes unseen from person to person. The problem is doctors don't provide enough knowledge to the general public and therefore people see it as 'thats serious don't be stupid.' This stops people who truly suffer from speaking out, weather they always feel sad or have suicidal thoughts. Due to the lack of knowledge people either skip the subject because its 'too serious' or they joke about wanting to 'kill themselves,' either should not be something that is accepted in society. Depression needs to be talked about as a serious matter that shouldn't be overlooked or foreseen.
There are 8 different types of depression;
- Major Depression.
- Persistent Depressive Disorder.
- Bipolar Disorder.
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Psychotic Depression.
- Peripartum (Postpartum) Depression.
- Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD)
- 'Situational' Depression.
If you're reading this as somebody who doesn't suffer from depression, here is some information to help you understand;
- All or nothing thinking. You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories.
- Overgeneralisation. You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
- Mental filter. You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives.
- Discounting the positives. You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count.
- Jumping to conclusions You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence. These include mind reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you) and fortune telling (predicting that things will turn out badly).
- Magnification or minimization. You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance.
- Emotional reasoning. You reason from how you feel: “I feel like an idiot, so I must be one.”
- “Should” statements. You criticise yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’t,” “musts,” “oughts.”
- Labeling Instead of saying, “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself, or “I’m a loser.”
- Blame. You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem
-
- Raynaud’s- causes some areas of your body, such as your fingers and toes, to feel numb and cold in response to cold temperatures or stress. In Raynaud's disease, smaller arteries that supply blood to your skin narrow, limiting blood circulation to affected areas (vasospasm).
- Migrains
- Digestive Problems
- Chest and back pain
- Exhaustion and fatigue
- Sleeping problems
- Weight loss and change in appetite
- Dizziness and light-headed.
Mood board
Personal study- writing only
Photography lost its innocence many years ago. In fact, it could be said that it never actually fulfilled its status as a truthful representation of the world. “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” (Ansel Adams,1900). In this century we often lean towards believing that a picture tells a true, unbiased story, without even second guessing where and why the image was created. Because of this we are led and manipulated by marketers, product designers and advertisers, and we don’t notice.
Because of accidental discoveries in darkroom photo-manipulation, artist rendering was discovered and then developed with technology as it advanced. Since then we have experimented with the way we take pictures, how we make pictures and what we do in post-production editing. This means that photographers and their editors are able to change what is 'true' and decide how the work is perceived, fooling the viewer into believing a false truth. The further we are from the initial shutter click, the further we stray from the truth. Photography is a form of art that forms many of our views and beliefs but we forget to take into account why and how the art was created.
The ability to manipulate the truth originates in paintings, which were directed by artists and their subjects to demonstrate great wealth or status to the viewer. For example, Henry VIII was always depicted in paintings as a large, strong, muscular man. As photography wasn’t discovered in the 16th Century, there are no photographic images to inform us how this monarch actually looked, however there are many written descriptions. Henry VIII was apparently very slim for most of his life because he was athletic and stood at 6’2”. People say he had “an extremely fine calf to his leg” (M Hanson, 2015), which is not shown in this painting. A jousting injury to his leg at Greenwich Palace in 1536 at just 44 years old left the king incapacitated and thereafter his waist grew from 32 inches to an enormous 52 inches, yet all his portraits remain visually the same.
This demonstrates the wish of the painter and subject to create a particular aesthetic; in commissioned portrait paintings, the ultimate control over the finished product lay with the person who had financial control over the piece – usually the subject themselves – and therefore this person could dictate the way the painter depicted them. Photography was initially more able to demonstrate the ‘truth’ of what was in front of the photographer, but advances in darkroom manipulation, and later digital technology, enable photographers (and their subjects, particularly as we all become savvier in the use of photographic editing software through the democratisation of photography as a medium) to create portraits almost as ‘false’ and malleable as those in paintings.
One of the first famously-manipulated photographic images, created 150 years ago, was of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. In the image shown to the world he looks like a typical all-American hero of the time. However, the head of Lincoln was edited onto the body of the 16th Commander in Chief, using darkroom techniques to create an entirely new image. This image was claimed to be the first heroic image of Lincoln, but as we know now, it was fake. Only years later did everyone find out that the image was manipulated. This meant that civilians who had never personally met Lincoln believed he looked like this because they had nothing else to compare to and most people were unaware of the power of image manipulation.
In the time that this image was created, ordinary citizens relied on illustration and photographic imagery to inform them about the world around them because travel was not financially viable for the vast majority of people, and information was much less accessible than in contemporary society where we have the internet at our fingertips. Therefore, this type of blatant image manipulation was a form of propaganda, used to deceive and potentially influence the democratic public.
Another example from earlier years was how Stalin famously airbrushed his enemies out of his image.
Nowadays, commonplace image manipulation is very popular, to the point that ‘to Photoshop’ has become a recognised verb in the English Language; in fact, we are so used to false imagery that we don’t even spot it any more. Manipulation of photographic imagery has always taken place, in many forms, for many different reasons. One example is ‘airbrushing’ to visually improve the visual appearance of models; Justin Bieber was famously ‘photo-shopped’ for a Calvin Klein shoot, so that the underwear looked ‘better’ on him and this was done for promotional and advertising purposes as well as self-advertising for Bieber. Bieber was edited to make him appear to have bigger, more masculine hands, and a more muscular body, which would attract women to further obsess over him, appealing to fans and viewers, which would promote the underwear more.
Both Bieber and Calvin Klein allowed (or maybe encouraged) this type of air brushing because the former wants people to see the best side of him, whether it is fake or not, and the latter because the bigger and better appeal a semi-naked Bieber has with the audience, the stronger the desire for their products, giving Bieber, the company and also the consumers what they want. This is why many people do not notice commonplace image manipulation; because fans of a subject obsess too much over their celebrity, they
don’t want to believe the truth behind the image, persuading themselves and others that this celebrity is ‘perfect’ without even knowing they are doing it.
On the other hand, commonplace image manipulation can be done badly, which forces us as a consumer to lose trust in a company, even though we know and accept that all companies do it. Only when the editing has gone obviously awry does it cause a media outcry, as in the example, right, showing an advertising image for the fashion brand Ralph Lauren. The image demonstrates very obvious and uneven editing on the model's waist, and this visual error was obvious to buyers. This caused media uproar because you would expect a company that is worth millions to be able to pay someone to do a job correctly, this meant buyers questioned their other work and the brand, which lost them many buyers. On top of the commercial impact, the social and psychological impact that this overt editing had on potential buyers also caused negative publicity for the company.
Another example of the way in which images are manipulated, is editing for propaganda and media purposes, to persuade the public to think a certain way about an event or the world around us. In 1994, OJ Simpson had his mug shot famously manipulated by Time magazine, which wanted to persuade the public he murdered his ex-wife. Side by side with the original mug shot, you can tell his skin was darkened and you can only see his eyes clearly. This caused a change in the public perception in that it created a more sinister aesthetic and played on the stereotypes of racial inequality.
Nowadays we use photography to experience the world from our bed, scrolling on social media apps and sites such as Instagram or Facebook. As much as we want to believe in the reality of the soft blue waters of exotic travel photographs, when it comes to war and conflict we look for any perceived mistake that enables us to deny the reality of what we see in the images. We use the excuse of 'it’s Photo-shopped' and 'that’s fake' to decide what we trust or not.
For example, Narciso Contraras took an image of a solider and edited out a camera belonging to one of his colleagues. This meant that Contraras didn’t change anything about the image that demonstrated what was happening in the conflict zone, but civilians jumped to decide that the whole image was fake, when in fact the reality of the matter was real. I question whether civilians forced Narciso Contraras to lose his income, reputation and his Pulitzer prize because he edited an image slightly, altering nothing about the main focus, or whether it was because they don't like the reality of what happens around us?
Kevin Carter was a photojournalist that documented the sickening treatment of civilians in South Africa during apartheid. He took an image of a starving young girl, in which it appeared a vulture was close by, watching over her. The image gave the impression that the vulture was waiting for the girl to die. However, there was a much larger distance between the child and the vulture than it appears, but the angle of the photographer changed the perspective and therefore perception of this image. Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this image, however some people said that he was inhumane, and should have dropped his camera to run to the child’s aid. People jumped to blame Carter for what was happening in the image, but despite not helping him, Carter did not put the child in that situation. If Carter helped everyone he saw, then he wouldn’t have been a photographer. Carter shouldn’t be the one who is blamed for what happened, but people blamed him because they didn’t want to accept what was really going on. Due to the horrific abuse Carter received, he killed himself shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize for the image.
Due to the seriousness of war and conflict, we often look for a reason not to believe the images we see. When we can't be at the scene of these horrific moments and we can't trust still images, the only thing we could potentially trust is videography. As recordings have only been introduced and used more recently, we trust this technology more because we have no reason not to. The technology of this medium seems more complex
in terms of editing and manipulation, and therefore we believe that it would be much more difficult to alter a moving image. We trust videos that are obviously amateur footage and poor quality, as this means they are not shot by a professional, and therefore less likely to be edited, as video editing isn't easily accessible to the layperson, unlike Photoshop and editing apps. I suspect that in a few years we will no longer trust videos, as the technology will become democratised in a similar way to photography, and people will learn how to easily edit them. Eventually a more advanced technology will be developed, and this will become the new media that we trust, until the cycle repeats again. This is the evolution of lens-based imagery and visual media.
I believe the next photography evolution will be live recording, which is becoming more popular now. On 26th February 2018, Rentis Robinson was live recording whilst walking through the street and Douglas Colson shot him 4 times for no reason; the whole incident was broadcast live on Facebook at the time for everyone to see. As this recording is published live, as it is shot, there is no way for it to be edited and therefore we trust it.
I am sure that as technology evolves, we will find a way to edit live videos but for now I think it is the only form of lens-based media we can trust. A camera represents colour in all of its dynamic range, which differs from those colours detected by the human eye, which again differs between individual human vision. So how do we represent the real world if we all see it differently?
"The human eye works less like a camera than you think. So, arguably, the only real way to get an accurate representation of reality would be to edit a shot to be exactly as the eye saw it."
(Alex Cooke, 2016)
I think if one presents a manipulated image to an audience and it is done badly, you will get caught out and your trust as a photographer will be diminished.
"We have to redefine the term "manipulation," because there are no manipulations if there are no absolutes."
(Alex Cooke, 2016)
“While photographing subjects, do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events. Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.”
(Alex Cooke, 2016)
As each photographer works in a different way it would be unfair to make everyone comply with this photographic rule. However, images that are presenting truth and realism should agree to this.
I question whether digital manipulation is a bad thing; as a form of art it can create stunning work. However, for advertising and documentary, you are selling a fake and idealised view of the world, and therefore manipulation is expected and accepted to a point.
Can we trust Photography?
Going back to the title of the essay, I don’t personally think we can trust photography in terms of wanting to depict the truth because there are too many ways we can change the visual truth. The image of Bieber was changed by editing on Photoshop, whereas Carter’s image was manipulated by the perspective of the camera, and both of these manipulations went initially unnoticed. As far as photography goes, we have to take into account the context and content before we judge the truth. At the moment, the only thing we can trust is video recording, but I am sure as technology evolves we will find a reason to no longer trust that either, until something else comes along
Because of accidental discoveries in darkroom photo-manipulation, artist rendering was discovered and then developed with technology as it advanced. Since then we have experimented with the way we take pictures, how we make pictures and what we do in post-production editing. This means that photographers and their editors are able to change what is 'true' and decide how the work is perceived, fooling the viewer into believing a false truth. The further we are from the initial shutter click, the further we stray from the truth. Photography is a form of art that forms many of our views and beliefs but we forget to take into account why and how the art was created.
The ability to manipulate the truth originates in paintings, which were directed by artists and their subjects to demonstrate great wealth or status to the viewer. For example, Henry VIII was always depicted in paintings as a large, strong, muscular man. As photography wasn’t discovered in the 16th Century, there are no photographic images to inform us how this monarch actually looked, however there are many written descriptions. Henry VIII was apparently very slim for most of his life because he was athletic and stood at 6’2”. People say he had “an extremely fine calf to his leg” (M Hanson, 2015), which is not shown in this painting. A jousting injury to his leg at Greenwich Palace in 1536 at just 44 years old left the king incapacitated and thereafter his waist grew from 32 inches to an enormous 52 inches, yet all his portraits remain visually the same.
This demonstrates the wish of the painter and subject to create a particular aesthetic; in commissioned portrait paintings, the ultimate control over the finished product lay with the person who had financial control over the piece – usually the subject themselves – and therefore this person could dictate the way the painter depicted them. Photography was initially more able to demonstrate the ‘truth’ of what was in front of the photographer, but advances in darkroom manipulation, and later digital technology, enable photographers (and their subjects, particularly as we all become savvier in the use of photographic editing software through the democratisation of photography as a medium) to create portraits almost as ‘false’ and malleable as those in paintings.
One of the first famously-manipulated photographic images, created 150 years ago, was of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. In the image shown to the world he looks like a typical all-American hero of the time. However, the head of Lincoln was edited onto the body of the 16th Commander in Chief, using darkroom techniques to create an entirely new image. This image was claimed to be the first heroic image of Lincoln, but as we know now, it was fake. Only years later did everyone find out that the image was manipulated. This meant that civilians who had never personally met Lincoln believed he looked like this because they had nothing else to compare to and most people were unaware of the power of image manipulation.
In the time that this image was created, ordinary citizens relied on illustration and photographic imagery to inform them about the world around them because travel was not financially viable for the vast majority of people, and information was much less accessible than in contemporary society where we have the internet at our fingertips. Therefore, this type of blatant image manipulation was a form of propaganda, used to deceive and potentially influence the democratic public.
Another example from earlier years was how Stalin famously airbrushed his enemies out of his image.
Nowadays, commonplace image manipulation is very popular, to the point that ‘to Photoshop’ has become a recognised verb in the English Language; in fact, we are so used to false imagery that we don’t even spot it any more. Manipulation of photographic imagery has always taken place, in many forms, for many different reasons. One example is ‘airbrushing’ to visually improve the visual appearance of models; Justin Bieber was famously ‘photo-shopped’ for a Calvin Klein shoot, so that the underwear looked ‘better’ on him and this was done for promotional and advertising purposes as well as self-advertising for Bieber. Bieber was edited to make him appear to have bigger, more masculine hands, and a more muscular body, which would attract women to further obsess over him, appealing to fans and viewers, which would promote the underwear more.
Both Bieber and Calvin Klein allowed (or maybe encouraged) this type of air brushing because the former wants people to see the best side of him, whether it is fake or not, and the latter because the bigger and better appeal a semi-naked Bieber has with the audience, the stronger the desire for their products, giving Bieber, the company and also the consumers what they want. This is why many people do not notice commonplace image manipulation; because fans of a subject obsess too much over their celebrity, they
don’t want to believe the truth behind the image, persuading themselves and others that this celebrity is ‘perfect’ without even knowing they are doing it.
On the other hand, commonplace image manipulation can be done badly, which forces us as a consumer to lose trust in a company, even though we know and accept that all companies do it. Only when the editing has gone obviously awry does it cause a media outcry, as in the example, right, showing an advertising image for the fashion brand Ralph Lauren. The image demonstrates very obvious and uneven editing on the model's waist, and this visual error was obvious to buyers. This caused media uproar because you would expect a company that is worth millions to be able to pay someone to do a job correctly, this meant buyers questioned their other work and the brand, which lost them many buyers. On top of the commercial impact, the social and psychological impact that this overt editing had on potential buyers also caused negative publicity for the company.
Another example of the way in which images are manipulated, is editing for propaganda and media purposes, to persuade the public to think a certain way about an event or the world around us. In 1994, OJ Simpson had his mug shot famously manipulated by Time magazine, which wanted to persuade the public he murdered his ex-wife. Side by side with the original mug shot, you can tell his skin was darkened and you can only see his eyes clearly. This caused a change in the public perception in that it created a more sinister aesthetic and played on the stereotypes of racial inequality.
Nowadays we use photography to experience the world from our bed, scrolling on social media apps and sites such as Instagram or Facebook. As much as we want to believe in the reality of the soft blue waters of exotic travel photographs, when it comes to war and conflict we look for any perceived mistake that enables us to deny the reality of what we see in the images. We use the excuse of 'it’s Photo-shopped' and 'that’s fake' to decide what we trust or not.
For example, Narciso Contraras took an image of a solider and edited out a camera belonging to one of his colleagues. This meant that Contraras didn’t change anything about the image that demonstrated what was happening in the conflict zone, but civilians jumped to decide that the whole image was fake, when in fact the reality of the matter was real. I question whether civilians forced Narciso Contraras to lose his income, reputation and his Pulitzer prize because he edited an image slightly, altering nothing about the main focus, or whether it was because they don't like the reality of what happens around us?
Kevin Carter was a photojournalist that documented the sickening treatment of civilians in South Africa during apartheid. He took an image of a starving young girl, in which it appeared a vulture was close by, watching over her. The image gave the impression that the vulture was waiting for the girl to die. However, there was a much larger distance between the child and the vulture than it appears, but the angle of the photographer changed the perspective and therefore perception of this image. Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this image, however some people said that he was inhumane, and should have dropped his camera to run to the child’s aid. People jumped to blame Carter for what was happening in the image, but despite not helping him, Carter did not put the child in that situation. If Carter helped everyone he saw, then he wouldn’t have been a photographer. Carter shouldn’t be the one who is blamed for what happened, but people blamed him because they didn’t want to accept what was really going on. Due to the horrific abuse Carter received, he killed himself shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize for the image.
Due to the seriousness of war and conflict, we often look for a reason not to believe the images we see. When we can't be at the scene of these horrific moments and we can't trust still images, the only thing we could potentially trust is videography. As recordings have only been introduced and used more recently, we trust this technology more because we have no reason not to. The technology of this medium seems more complex
in terms of editing and manipulation, and therefore we believe that it would be much more difficult to alter a moving image. We trust videos that are obviously amateur footage and poor quality, as this means they are not shot by a professional, and therefore less likely to be edited, as video editing isn't easily accessible to the layperson, unlike Photoshop and editing apps. I suspect that in a few years we will no longer trust videos, as the technology will become democratised in a similar way to photography, and people will learn how to easily edit them. Eventually a more advanced technology will be developed, and this will become the new media that we trust, until the cycle repeats again. This is the evolution of lens-based imagery and visual media.
I believe the next photography evolution will be live recording, which is becoming more popular now. On 26th February 2018, Rentis Robinson was live recording whilst walking through the street and Douglas Colson shot him 4 times for no reason; the whole incident was broadcast live on Facebook at the time for everyone to see. As this recording is published live, as it is shot, there is no way for it to be edited and therefore we trust it.
I am sure that as technology evolves, we will find a way to edit live videos but for now I think it is the only form of lens-based media we can trust. A camera represents colour in all of its dynamic range, which differs from those colours detected by the human eye, which again differs between individual human vision. So how do we represent the real world if we all see it differently?
"The human eye works less like a camera than you think. So, arguably, the only real way to get an accurate representation of reality would be to edit a shot to be exactly as the eye saw it."
(Alex Cooke, 2016)
I think if one presents a manipulated image to an audience and it is done badly, you will get caught out and your trust as a photographer will be diminished.
"We have to redefine the term "manipulation," because there are no manipulations if there are no absolutes."
(Alex Cooke, 2016)
“While photographing subjects, do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events. Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.”
(Alex Cooke, 2016)
As each photographer works in a different way it would be unfair to make everyone comply with this photographic rule. However, images that are presenting truth and realism should agree to this.
I question whether digital manipulation is a bad thing; as a form of art it can create stunning work. However, for advertising and documentary, you are selling a fake and idealised view of the world, and therefore manipulation is expected and accepted to a point.
Can we trust Photography?
Going back to the title of the essay, I don’t personally think we can trust photography in terms of wanting to depict the truth because there are too many ways we can change the visual truth. The image of Bieber was changed by editing on Photoshop, whereas Carter’s image was manipulated by the perspective of the camera, and both of these manipulations went initially unnoticed. As far as photography goes, we have to take into account the context and content before we judge the truth. At the moment, the only thing we can trust is video recording, but I am sure as technology evolves we will find a reason to no longer trust that either, until something else comes along